Guerrilla actor Babou Ceesay: I’d love to play The Joker in Batman

AS A rising star of the small and big screen, Babou Ceesay is emerging as an acting tour de force.

As a rising star of the small and big screen, Babou Ceesay is emerging as an acting tour de force

Depressing is the word actually,” admits Babou Ceesay, star of Sky Atlantic’s new drama, Guerrilla. “To be bluntly personal with you, what I have been going through is a form of grief.”

It may sound like a strange thing for a recent second-time dad and rising star of screens large and small to say, but Guerrilla raises some very big, very difficult, questions.

The drama asks what would have happened had the UK’s 1970s Black Power movement used violence, but what Babou finds depressing is that its themes – racism, nationalism, injustice and prejudice – are still so relevant today and show no sign of going away.

“You go through all of the stages of grief,” he continues. “I have been through the anger, denial, trying to bargain, and now I am at the depression stage – the final stage before acceptance. But what am I going to accept?

What I have been going through is a form of grief

Babou Ceesay

Am I going to accept that I am a black man and that I have to identify strongly as that in order to survive in the world? Or am I going to accept that this is just the way of the world and I have to find ways to make sure that I create the world that I want to create for myself and my kids and my community?

“These are the questions and I think that on some level we are all trying to answer them.

We are getting political but I hope Guerrilla starts conversations like this.”

Babou plays Marcus Hill, a struggling teacher who joins girlfriend Jas (Freida Pinto) and others to form a radical underground cell to fight back against injustice and Special Branch’s Black Power Desk – a unit that actually existed in the 1970s to crush the Black Power movement.

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The cast also includes Rory Kinnear and co-executive producer Idris Elba. It was created by Oscar-winning 12 Years A Slave writer John Ridley.

Such a heavyweight team and issues to match mean that the conversations Babou is hoping for are almost guaranteed and he says that, while the action takes place in the 1970s, the drama seems very current.

“When I met John I said to him, ‘It feels as if you’ve done something quite prophetic’ because this is happening now with the Black Lives Matter movement and the rise of Trump,” he recalls. “Brexit had just happened and was still raw. I grew up in west Africa but I have lived in Britain for 20 years and I am feeling the effects of feeling unwanted and all of that stuff.

“I said, ‘It feels as if you have put your finger on it,’ and he said, ‘Look, all of these things – Brexit, Trump – they are just players in a bigger picture. When you show someone something historic and relate it to today, you are hoping that someone might look at it and go, ‘It shouldn’t be this way,’ and that you might change one person’s mind.”

The drama doesn’t shy away from the violent side of these issues, and whether it’s individual harassment or police brutality on a riot-sized scale, Babou says that it was just as powerful to film as it is to watch.

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“It’s a case of no acting required. We spent a whole day shooting the riot scene and we were kept on different sides. After a while, when you’re standing opposite each other, shouting across a police line, it does cross over into something else. That sort of mob mentality can kick in.”

It’s all a far cry from Babou’s original career choice. Born in Barnet before moving to Gambia aged one, Babou’s father worked in the international community. After five years in Gambia, the family spent 11 years in Togo and Babou attended a British school, then returned to the UK to study microbiology at Imperial College London.

After graduation, he became an internal auditor with multinational company Deloitte, then finally left aged 24 to study full time at the Oxford School of Drama.

It was a brave move that he now looks back on as “crazy” but it’s clear that it was the only choice for him.

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Guerrilla is on Thursday at 9pm on Sky Atlantic

“I was obsessed with film,” he remembers. “My mum would tell me I would sit at the front and shush everybody when films were on. I always wanted to be an actor so that was the time to take the risk. In the end I have no regrets.

I would have said this regardless of Guerrilla and some of the things that have been happening to me recently. It was a profound experience.”

Some of those things that Babou refers to are roles in Channel 4’s much talked-about Robbie Coltrane drama National Treasure and the BBC’s brilliant Damilola, Our Loved Boy, in which he played Damilola Taylor’s father Richard.

He is also currently starring in Ben Wheatley’s latest action-comedy film, Free Fire, alongside Armie Hammer, Brie Larson and Cillian Murphy. He also managed to sneak in a cameo on Star Wars spin-off, Rogue One.

“Last year was a dream year,” he says.

“I couldn’t ask for more. I can’t say that it was by design though. Definitely there is a demand on my part to want to be involved in good work but it doesn’t always work out that way.”

Babou talks of the inevitability of working in America even though, thanks to his two young children, he is talking to us in his dressing gown from his family home in Kent.

He’s certainly got huge ambitions for Hollywood. “I’d love to play The Joker in Batman,” he reveals. “I would love to see a black person play that role. Someone who whites up, covers up his face, tries to be something else and, for him, at the end of the day it is just jokes. I would love to see that.

If Warner Brothers are ready, I’m ready!”

Before that though, Babou admits that his current success can feel like a bit of a blur.

And while he may be dealing with some weighty issues in Guerrilla and handling a punishing work schedule, he isn’t about to take it for granted for a minute.

“I sit and think, ‘Wow,’” he admits. “This is the best-case scenario. I have 18-hour days when you are so tired and you haven’t seen your family, you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re doubting yourself and so on, but I am living what I would define as the dream, right this second.

To have such incredible roles to play around such incredible people who are so committed to their craft – and not only that – they are treating you with respect. You’re no longer the fraudulent accountant that is standing there, you’re an actor.”